Musk is paid $1tn. Nvidia’s worth $5tn. Yet America’s poor are struggling to eat | Steven Greenhouse

We may be in a golden age for the super-rich - but it doesn't feel that way for the 42 million Americans who use Snap

It seems like an understatement to call this the New Gilded Age. Perhaps we should instead call it the Obscenely Over-the-Top Gilded Age, considering that Tesla shareholders just approved a $1tn pay package for Elon Musk and the market value of chipmaker Nvidia has rocketed above $5tn.

Not only that, the 10 richest billionaires in the US saw their collective wealth soar by $698bn over the past year, while Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, reportedly paid $110m for a 123-room mansion in Los Angeles to host events. And then there's our billionaire president, who - when his family isn't raking in tens of millions of dollars through crypto - is obsessed with building a $300m, gilded-to-the-hilt ballroom, funded by fellow billionaires.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues